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PROGRAM ONE HUNDRED TWENTy-THIRD SEASON Chicago Symphony Orchestra Riccardo Muti Music Director Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant Global Sponsor of the CSO Thursday, April 3, 2014, at 8:00 Saturday, April 5, 2014, at 8:00 Tuesday, April 8, 2014, at 7:30 Esa-Pekka Salonen Conductor Clyne <<rewind<< First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances Bartók Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19 INTERMISSION Sibelius Four Legends from the Kalevala, Op. 22 Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari Lemminkäinen in Tuonela The Swan of Tuonela Scott Hostetler, english horn Lemminkäinen’s Return CSO Tuesday series concerts are sponsored by United Airlines. This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts. COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher Anna Clyne Born March 9, 1980, London, England. <<rewind<< Th e work by Anna Clyne With most of her compositions, including that our orchestra is <<rewind<<, Clyne begins by working at a piano, playing this week, because she likes the tactile sensation of trying <<rewind<<, comes from things out on the instrument. Clyne’s music early in her still-young itself is very physical—when she was writing career, before she had <<rewind<<, music that was designed to be moved to Chicago as one danced, she would jump around the room to test of our Mead how physical gestures matched the sounds and Composers-in-Residence. rhythmic patterns in her score. Clyne’s music At the time, she was is also deeply personal—never more so than in living in Brooklyn and composing in a gloomy, Within Her Arms, the piece she wrote in memory windowless room in a warehouse because she of her mother who died suddenly in 2009. (It couldn’t fi t a piano in her apartment. “I could was performed here on a MusicNOW concert probably compose anywhere,” Clyne once said, in December 2011.) Clyne learned that writing refl ecting on a process that is so consuming that music made the grieving process easier—it was the outside world often disappears. When she’s the best way for her to express herself. When deep into a piece, she sometimes works through Within Her Arms was premiered in Disney the night, which is what happened when she was Concert Hall, on the LA Philharmonic’s Green composing <<rewind<<. Umbrella series, people came up to her to tell her Like many of Clyne’s compositions, it was how moved they were by the piece, even though originally a collaborative project—in this case, they had no idea of the circumstances surround- a piece to be danced. Clyne gravitates to col- ing its composition. “When you touch people laboration because, as she puts it, it forces you who don’t know you,” Clyne says, “you sense to break out of your shell—and she thrives on there’s something real in the music.” the kind of creative dialogue it opens. Although Clyne initially drew attention for the way she is known for working with artists in other her music combined electronics and acoustic disciplines—choreographers, fi lmmakers, instruments—that, along with her passion for writers, painters—she also loves to collaborate collaboration, quickly became her signature. But with musicians in the process of working out in <<rewind<<, composed nearly a decade ago, the details of a new composition—something she accomplished the same layering of diff erent that will undoubtedly shape the violin concerto sound worlds by writing just for the instruments she is writing for Jennifer Koh and the CSO to of the orchestra, and since then she has often premiere next season. gravitated away from incorporating electronics. COMPOSED INSTRUMENTATION APPROXIMATE 2005; revised 2006, 2010 two fl utes and piccolo, two oboes, PERFORMANCE TIME two clarinets, two bassoons, four 7 minutes FIRST PERFORMANCE horns, two trumpets, two trombones, February 17, 2005; Manhattan School harp, piano, bass drum, suspended of Music, New York City cymbal, crotales, ratchet, snare drum, brake drum, xylophone, tam-tam, FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES vibraphone, sizzle cymbal, low metal These are the fi rst Chicago Symphony pipe, laptop, timpani, strings Orchestra performances. 2 lyne has composed two works for the ANNA CLYNE COMMENTS ON <<REWIND<< Chicago Symphony to play during <<rewind<< is inspired by the image of analog her residency. Night Ferry, premiered videotape rapidly scrolling backwards with fleet- Cunder Riccardo Muti’s baton in February 2012, ing moments of skipping, freezing, and warping. was designed to complement the music of The original version, for orchestra and tape, was Franz Schubert and found its dark, flickering composed in 2005 for choreographer and artistic colors and volatile shape after Clyne read that director of the Los Angeles–based Hysterica Schubert suffered from cyclothymia, a form of Dance Company, Kitty McNamee. A distinct depression. Prince of Clouds, performed here in characteristic of McNamee’s work is its striking December 2012, is a double violin concerto that and innovative use of physical gestures and pays homage to the teacher-student lineage of movements that recur throughout the course of the soloists for whom it was composed (Jaime her work to build and bind its narrative structure. Laredo and Jennifer Koh) and at the same time This use of repetitive gestures is utilized in the to Bach’s famous concerto for two violins. musical language and structure of <<rewind<<. The approach I used to compose <<rewind<< is lyne was born in London. Her earliest very much derivative from my work with electro- physical contact with music was on a acoustic music; primarily the layering of multiple piano with randomly missing keys that sounds and textures to create one solid unit of Cwas given to her family when she was seven sound. As you will hear, the strings are the driving years old. She wrote her first fully notated piece, force behind this music. I started by composing for flute and piano, at the age of eleven, but at the entire framework in the strings. This structure the time, she had no thoughts of becoming a stems from an alternating two-chord motif, heard composer. Her parents listened to folk music and within the opening measures of the work. Once the Beatles—the world of the symphony orches- I had this structure in place, I went back to the tra, where she is now at home, was remote. Clyne beginning and added layers in the other instru- studied cello at Edinburgh University and then mental families. These range from long, sustained, moved to New York in 2002, with little more and warping tones to punchy articulations. than her suitcase and her cello. There she began I wrote <<rewind<< while living in New York her routine of composing at night, supporting City, a city which is true to its legend as one that herself as a freelance cellist and with a series of doesn’t sleep. I worked on this piece at night, day jobs. At twenty-three, she received a schol- when the sounds of the city were very much alive arship to study composition at the Manhattan in force. Something that I like about this piece School of Music, and her career as a composer is the way that the city crept into the music. I soon took off. Clyne has since received several remember at one point, I was sitting at the piano important honors, including eight consecu- playing through one of the faster sections when tive ASCAP Plus awards and a Charles Ives a van ripped down the adjacent road, blasting Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts its siren, fading in pitch as it disappeared into and Letters. This past September, the Last Night the night. By coincidence, the pitch matched at the Proms opened with the world premiere perfectly the section I was playing, and I added of Clyne’s Masquerade, which was broadcast this siren into the horns—long notes that fell in globally by the BBC and viewed by millions. pitch through the phrase. 3 Béla Bartók Born March 25, 1881, Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary. Died September 26, 1945, New York City. Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, Op. 19 After Th e Miraculous year. Although a piano reduction was published Mandarin, Bartók never in 1925, Bartók wasn’t satisfi ed with the ending again attempted to write (he had had similar trouble with the conclusion music for the theater. His of Bluebeard’s Castle) and continued to fuss with fi rst stage works, the it. He didn’t put his fi nal thoughts on paper opera Bluebeard’s Castle until 1931. and the ballet Th e Wooden When Bartók discovered that Universal Prince, fared well enough Editions, his Viennese publisher, was advertising (although it took six years the Mandarin as a ballet, he protested: “I have to get the opera pro- to observe that this work is less a ballet than a duced), but Th e Miraculous Mandarin gave Bartók pantomime, since only two dances actually occur continual diffi culty. For the rest of his career, he in it. It would therefore be much more practical wrote only concert works—a decision that to call it a pantomime.” produced a number of masterpieces, but denied Even before he fi nished orchestrating the score, the development of his theatrical talent. Bartók began to doubt that he would ever see the In 1917, while he was putting the fi nishing work staged. In fact, the performance history of touches on Th e Wooden Prince, Bartók read Th e Miraculous Mandarin is marked by such for- Menyhért Lengyel’s libretto for Th e Miraculous midable struggles that the score didn’t receive the Mandarin in a Hungarian literary magazine.

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